Thinkpads Forum

Hello, i (almost always) hused my W520 on power but i just wanted to try it with battery now to see its performance.

I read the reviews @notebookcheck and they rate the 9cell for running ~6h while web surfing. I get ~3h...

My 9cells are nearly mint (3-8 cycles only), CPU's running at its lowest are & no consuming apps running..?!

Make sure to change your power plan settings to balanced, and have NVIDIA optimus to enabled to prevent the discrete gpu from draining a lot of power.

Also, what does the lenovo battery management application say about your battery? It should tell you how many cycles and what % of charge the battery can hold compared to its design capacity. Batteries that sit at 100% for extended periods of time, such as when the laptop is plugged in, can lose capacity relatively quickly even though they have low cycle counts.

goji wrote:My 9cells are nearly mint (3-8 cycles only), CPU's running at its lowest are & no consuming apps running..?!

The biggest battery drainer on any notebook is the screen, so if you're running yours at full brightness, that will drain the battery more quickly.

It's not full, it's like 10/15. Of course i made sure i was using optimus. Low CPU too as said, and these batteries are new.

I realise now that i was using discrete graphics and that's why i got sh*** battery life! I did a battery calibration & end up with 84Wh avalaible (instead of 93Wh initially). Notebookcheck (same unit) report 6h wifi & 10h IDLE.

After turning to integrated, it seems i get about ~4h30 with light browsing. Even though battery lost ~10Wh, i should get more than that, don't you think? Only thing that use CPU little is windows sidebar, killing it = not much changes.

The worse is their report for IDLE use (lowest power mode, no wireless connections: 10hours!!) : i do not get more than in light browsing mode (~5h)!! Any idea what could cause this? I keep thinking but no clues so far..